Case study: Online Review Management in the Healthcare industry

When you serve thousands of patients every month, every opinion counts. In the growing habit for patients sharing their positive and negative experience in the social media and online review sites, a growing number of healthcare service provider, had to act when understanding patients are looking online and some of them are walking away.

Online review and the healthcare industry

Most of the time, people who are seeking for health solutions are the ones who either have an urgent problem or patients who seek to change their current doctor (second opinion for example).

Such patients, are trying to find a new doctor, out of the online Doctors / professionals networks, forums and mainly medical reviews websites which are ratings health care providers.

Last research made by NCBI shows how critical are the reviews for patients, prior choosing their doctor or healthcare solution:

• 60% of adults say that online ratings are important to their decisions about provider choice

• 37% avoid doctors due to negative reviews

• 33% of patients say their choice of a provider is affected by positive reviews

Source: NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

We needed more visible positive reviews and less negative reviews

For an EVO client, a top leading healthcare provider with 6500 clients per month, the problem became significant when he noticed:

1. Many of his happy clients, the majority case, don’t bother to voluntarily submit a positive review online (they are happy, they forget etc)

2. Only 1% of his clients was not happy but they were actually motivated to write a negative review online, which affected his reputation dramatically

3. The balance between actual online negative reviews (1% in real time but highly visible online!) didn’t reflect the fact he has 99% happy clients

When the financial results started to hit him with negative outcomes due to a growing number of new clients that are hesitating to come because of the online published negative reviews, he had to do something to fix the situation and fast.

EVO targets for this clients were based on 3 core elements:

1. Increasing the number of happy clients that will submit positive reviews

2. Reducing the visibility of unhappy clients, by amplifying the voice of the happy ones and by solving internally the situation, before it goes online.

3. Channeling the online positive reviews to different online sites and social media channels in order to increase further the positive marketing affect to attract new clients for his client

Positive reviews increased by 500% in the first 3 month

After working closely with the client, applying specific know how to the healthcare domain, the actions achieved by EVO online review management team, have helped the client in achieving exactly what he need.

Using the unique EVO review boosting technologies, we have aggregated every month more than 6500 patient’s reviews data, from several locations and clinics of the same network into one place, and channeling them to the right directions – in this specific case to the client Facebook page and 2 chosen medical review sites which are commonly used by his clients.

It was now showing clearly, this clinic is an excellent one, with more than 95% happy patient’s rates that boosted the global review rates of the clinic’s network and finally attracted also a new streams of coming patients.

The positive results also boosted the clinic location on the Google search engine as a recommended business on the first page.

Being responsive for negative & positive reviews

By using the customized reporting and monitoring tools, the customer service clinic team could respond both to positive reviews ( thanking them online) and mostly important, to react in real time to negative reviews submitted by clients and transferred to them in a format of a survey, allowing them to respond the clients before the actual reviews is submitted online

The results was showing clearly with a positive growth rate each and every month:

1. Positive reviews rate has grown in approx. 500%, based on real patients reviews

2. General review rates has grown in more than 60%

3. Average Star rating grown from 3.7 to 4.87

4. New admissions has grown in 25% within 24 month

The positive results created a major change in the clinics network, both from shareholders perspective and the employee’s views. Bringing patients fidelity to the top.

It has helped them in creating stronger brand and for the long term.

Managing the patient reviews is an ongoing daily task which we are proud to carry for our healthcare industry clients, helping them in achieving their target but also offering greater services to their patients, by targeting every month a better and better result.

The metrics and numbers speaks for itself, showing clearly the actions were right

For more information about this case and online reviews management - contact us we are happy to talk!